The performance of the speech enhancement modules depends upon the ability to filter out all the interference signals leaving only the desired speech signals. Interference signals might be, for example, other speakers, noise from air conditions, music, motor noise (e.g. in a car or airplane) and large crowd noise also known as ‘cocktail party noise’. The performance of speech enhancement modules is normally measured by their ability to improve the speech-to-noise-ratio (SNR) or the speech-to-interference-ratio (SIR), which reflects the ratio (often in dB scale) of the power of the desired speech signal to the total power of the noise and of other interfering signals respectively.
There is a growing need to perform speech enhancement in a reverberant environment.